steve scalise, a congressman from louisiana, recently elected as the leader of the republican study committee for the next congress. i yield to the gentleman from louisiana. mr. scalise: i thank the gentlelady for her leadership, not only for hosting this hour but for being so passionate about the need to control spending, and the need to get the economy back on track. she was talking about about solutions to avert the fiscal cliff. if if you look at how we got here, nothing gets resolved out of washington, it's an abyss that doesn't need to happen. if you just go back and look at the promises made by poth because massachusetts when he was running for office, when he was running for re-election, he talked about working across the aisle he talked about bipartisan solutions he talked about it a lot and the american people expected that the president would keep that promise. but before the ink was even dry, before some of the states had confirmed and finalized their vote totals for this last election, the president comes out with a hyper partisan solution that's his approach. when the president